Food ‘n Drink

Posted by Sarah

It’s been a while I know, however that’s because we’ve had great weather here in the UK and as we have so little we make the most of it! Anyhow, we’ve been busy in the garden trying to clear it up and at least give us a semi nice place to sit in over the summer. I’ve finally had a chance to take some photos

I’ve been very impressed with my strawberry plants as I didn’t expect much from them this year, or in fact in the future. When we moved last November the garden was left until the last minute and I simply dug up as many plants as I could, put them in my tray (non draining) and left them on the patio of the new house for about 3 months. I know, very poor showing, but we’d had so much going on! I’d tip the water out of the tray when I remembered but it wasn’t very often, so the plants were sitting in an inch or two of water with their roots either exposed or in a bit of earth. Anyway, I got them repotted into individual pots, a few in larger pots, plus a hanging basket, and besides one plant they’ve all got flowers on! I’m not sure which plants are the older ones and which are the runners from last year, so I’ll find out by the size of the fruit! However I’m pretty happy that we’ll still have a few fresh strawberries this year.

This year everything is in a pot, growbag or hanging basket. I’m not planting anything into the ground including salad. We’ve not got any gardening area and I decided I wasn’t going to start digging up the little amount of grass we have! So this is my first tray of lettuce. They seem to be doing quite well. I’ve got a deeper tray like a window box which I’ll be using too once I’ve got some more salad plants on the go. My seeds that I sowed about 6 weeks ago are going a bit slow so I think it’s time to do some more and hopefully they’ll react a bit quicker. However these lettuce should be ready for the pickings soon I hope

My new greenhouse! Just thought it was worth a mention. 4 tier greenhouse for around £18. Plenty of space to keep my pots, other seeds, little tools (trowel etc) and various other bits in, plus the top shelf for seedlings, and possibly I’ll use the second shelf down too.

This replaced my wrecked greenhouse from last month.

One of the 8 Jalapeno chilli plants we have on the go. After last year’s unsuccessful attempt at growing around 100 (ahem) I decided to just concentrate on a few this year instead. Actually I found the packet of seeds that I’d not sown last year (after buying some more this year!) and the packet had just a dozen in, 8 germinated. I’m planning to keep most of the chilli plants indoors this year as the climate isn’t right to put them outside really. We’ve also bought a Scotch Bonnet Chilli plant already grown (it’s not very big though!) so hopefully that will also do well for us. I may put a couple of plants outside if I run out of space on the windowsills.

My new addition to the garden is my portable tomato greenhouse. Last year I had 6 tomato plants on the go and they all suffered from blight due to the horrendous amount of rain we had. As this summer is predicted to be the same (but we all know predictions can be wrong!) I figured I’d rather control their water input. The greenhouse was about £17 from a local garden centre and can be found in most throughout the UK. It takes a growbag on the bottom (there’s a type of shelf under it) and there are also pegs on either side to hold it down too. I’ve got 2 tomato plants in this as you can see plus a Romano pepper plant (sweet pepper) that we also bought ready grown. I don’t tend to have much luck with sweet peppers but I still try each year! I’ve also used ring culture pots for the tomato plants to give them additional space for the roots. The greenhouse also has 2 holes at the top so it doesn’t get as hot and stuffy in there as it does in the other greenhouse, however I still ensure I open it up as the sun is coming round onto it and close it at night to keep the tomatoes at their best.

So there we are! That’s the garden so far. We’ve also got a gooseberry plant on the go. We’ve had it a couple of years now (again from my Dad, what would I do without him?!) and I pulled it up out of the ground when we moved last year and it’s been in a pot that’s not really big enough for it, however it’s still flourishing. I’ll probably try and get it into a bigger pot before the fruit start as I don’t think it’s in the right place at present. There’s a job to do this evening

Posted by Sarah

At Christmas I got a voucher with an online purchase for Virgin Wines. The voucher was £40 off and the deal was if I joined their Wine Bank I could get an additional £20 off their £100 top 12 selling wines case. So 12 bottles of wine for £40 plus delivery, can’t complain with that! My brother and I went in 50/50 for it (as the voucher was half mine and half his anyway), he gets the red wine I took the white. The wine that came was a mix of Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and others. I’ve had a few bottles of the white, most need a good meal with them though.

The deal on this voucher however was to join the Virgin Wine Bank. This means you can choose to pay X amount per month (eg. £20) into your wine bank account. After 3 months of payment they’ll give you another X amount for free. So for the past three months I’ve had £20 go off my credit card and then once I had £60 in there they gave me another £20. So £80 to spend on wine (like a kid in a sweet shop!).

I ran through the wines available and chose 10 different cheap dry whites (no Chardonnay thanks!), oh and when I say cheap we’re taking £5-8. I duplicated one bottle as I liked the sound of it, and I also got a Rose to try. 12 bottles plus delivery came to just over £80. Can’t complain when it’s delivered to your door though!

However, while that’s all well and good here are the real facts.

1. I wouldn’t usually spend more than £3.50-4 on a bottle of wine. The cheapest on this deal has been £5 less 25% so £3.75.
2. I can’t really afford £20 a month to go out of my account/credit card.
3. I don’t drink enough to get through 12 bottles every three months.
4. I’ve now got over 20 bottles of wine and no space for half of them!

It’s a good deal if you want to go for slightly more expensive wines, or get a nice selection to keep for dinner parties or special times, but I tend to like light dry whites which are easy to drink without soda water and with or without food. Plus, these days you can pick up so many deals on wine in the local supermarkets or wine shops. Sure, you could sign up to just receive a mixed box of wine each quarter and you get to try new wines, but usually these are 50/50 red/white and by not drinking red I’d lose out, and most of their mixed boxes had 3 or 4 bottles of each, which means if you don’t like one particular wine you’re stuck with at least 2 more bottles! (I guess they’ll come in handy for presents!).

So Virgin Wines, a good idea, especially if you like both reds and whites and fancy saving up for a little splurge every quarter, or once a year (you don’t have to buy after each quarter, you could save up for Christmas), but if you’re a less serious wine drinker and just prefer a nice easy drink then stick with the offers in the supermarkets or Costco

On that note, I’m off to finish some Torres Vina Sol

Posted by Sarah

My greenhouse got crushed by a falling branch off the neighbour’s tree whilst it was being trimmed back.

Posted by Sarah

Today we got some decent weather so I finally got around to repotting my Strawberry plants. The plants have sat in a non-draining shallow box since last December when I dug them up from my old garden. They’ve sat sodden in water, very little soil around them, but are still producing new leaves and shoots. Good hardy plants strawberries! I mixed up a bucket of about 1 part farm manure to 2 part top soil (as I don’t have any normal soil available to me!) and replanted about a dozen plants in large pots plus 4 went into a hanging basket. Whether we’ll get any fruit off them this year, who knows, but they should be fine for another year to 18 months so we’ll get fruit next year hopefully. They seem to have survived so far so I can’t see them dying off now they’ve been given a new home.

I also got my greenhouse set back up but realised I’d finished all of the seed compost last year so I need to get some more before I can start on planting some seeds. My plants for this year are

Strawberries (if they produce any fruit)
Chilli Peppers (another attempt, I’ve got Jalapeno and Tokyo Hot)
Lettuce
Radish
Spring Onion
Tomatoes (courtesey of 2 plants from my Dad)

I’ve also bought a portable tomato greenhouse which will take the two plants in a growbag plus maybe a chilli plant inbetween, and it’ll keep the rain off them and allow me to control their watering. After last year where my tomatoes suffered blight from all the rain, I don’t want to suffer from that again! This cost me just £17 in my parent’s local garden centre. It also means that if it does get very hot (it’s rare but it happens in the UK) I can easily cover the plants over during the high heat of the midday sun.

I can’t wait to get back to eating our own fresh food from the garden

Posted by Sarah

I’ve been meaning to update the design on this site for a while, and after trying out a few themes I’ve finally found a nice refreshing theme that I think works well with the site.

I’ve also added in a couple of new plugins, one allows you to edit your comment for up to 15 minutes after posting it, and the other allows you to subscribe to comments on a particular post, so you’ll get an email when a new comment is made. I’ve got a few new sections to add too, which will come in the next week or two.

So hope you like the new theme. Let me know if you spot any problems

Posted by Sarah

Read Part 1 of this series - Garden Preparation.

Regardless of whether you plan to grow plants in the ground or in large pots and hanging baskets (or both!), you need some plants to get started with. These days the garden centres can do the hard work for you and in April/May time you’ll find ready grown tomato plants, chilli plants, peppers, and more, at affordable prices. However, where’s the fun in that? Well, use it as a back up at least! Most salad plants such as lettuce, radish and spring onions, can be started from seed between March and August/September, depending on how long the good weather lasts. Tomato, chilli and pepper seeds should be planted in March/April time, kept covered and ideally in a warm environment such as a greenhouse or kitchen windowsill.

Starting with Seeds

So what do you need to get started? Work out what you want to grow first, especially if you’re short on space in the garden. Go to the local garden centre and have a look in the seeds section for the plants you want to grow. All seed packets will have information about sowing and reaping on the back of them so there’s no guessing needed. Follow the instructions and you should be fine. You’ll also need some seed trays of some sort, seed compost (John Innes No. 1 can be found in virtually all UK garden centres) and a sheltered area to store your seed trays - we have a 3 tier portable mini greenhouse which costs around £17. Substitutions for seed trays include egg trays. The idea with seed trays is that you just use the seed compost in it, place a few seeds (I usually do 2 or 3) per section, cover them over and just keep them watered. Once the seedlings start to appear you can thin them down to one per section. However I usually allow them to all grow (if you can try and space the seeds out a little within the little section then they’ll have a bit more space each).

Re-potting Seedlings

Once your seedlings appear strong and established (eg. they’re about 5cm high on lettuce and radish, perhaps a bit taller for spring onions) then you can take them out of the seed tray and either put them into the ground, if the cold weather has passed, or into a bigger pot with John Innes No. 2 soil based compost mixed with some soil. I personally have hanging basket and potting compost, also John Innes which I mix with top soil as I don’t have any soil available to me in the garden (besides digging up the grass and taking some out from under that!). For repotting you need to determine the size of pot or pots that you’ll need to use depending on how long the plant will be in the pot. For plants that will eventually go into the ground then a small pot should be fine to allow the roots to expand more, providing a stronger plant ready for the garden. However, for plants that you’re intending to keep in the pots for their lifetime then I’d start with a medium to large pot for a couple of weeks until it’s grown a bit stronger, and then move on to a larger container.

Growing in Pots

If you’re not intending to plant anything in the ground then you need to look at using pots and grow-bags. Most salad plants that you continually replace - lettuce, radish, spring onion, rocket etc., will not grow massive roots and so won’t need a great depth of space. You can get about 10cm deep long window type boxes which are about a metre long. These will work quite well for these plants, as will medium sized flower pots. You could also get a few large pots to go out on the patio and just fill them up with standard soil in the bottom, leaving the top 5-10 cm to be the mix of potting compost and soil. If you don’t have pots then look at what else you have. I’ve got empty 5l plastic water bottles at home and will be cutting a few of these up, taking the top off, adding a few holes in the bottom of them and voila, cheap large tubs for growing plants

If ground space is lacking you can also use hanging baskets to grow plants in. Strawberries work quite well in baskets, keeping the strawberries away from woodlice and slugs that have a habit of eating them, and can look colourful hanging down from the basket, ripening in the glorious sun. Treat hanging baskets in the same way as growing in pots.

Growing in the Ground

If you’re planting out in the garden then make sure that your plants will get the sunlight they need, keep the ground watered (do this at night to allow the water to seep deeper into the ground), if there’s a risk of cold weather or even frost then you’ll need to keep your plants covered. You can make a mini polytunnel with some corrugated plastic curved over the plants (use some canes or sticks to hold the plastic curved), and cover up the ends with some flat plastic. This will create a mini greenhouse over the plants which is great when the sun isn’t so warm. Also if the sun gets too hot (unlikely in the UK but it can happen!) then you may need to cover your plants with some fleece or covering that blocks out the hot midday sun. Also, be careful to not have water droplets on your lettuce leaves if the sun is out, else the leaves could burn.

Posted by Sarah

Seeing as I’m not doing much gardening myself this year I figured I’d just write more about it! After chatting to a few friends both offline and online, I’ve noticed a lot of people in my age range would like to try out growing their own fruit and veg but don’t necessarily know where to start. I’m pretty lucky in that I have my Dad on hand to ask all of my questions to, plus my parents gave me The Complete Gardener by Monty Don (a celeb TV gardener in the UK) which is a pretty good read.

Anyway, so I figured I’d start a few posts on setting up a new garden, what you need to do, think about and where to start, along with when to start planting your seeds etc. The timings on this are designed for people in the UK (and will probably suit Europe), but the information should apply to most people.

Getting Started

Okay so first off you need to look at what you’ve got to work with. Don’t let the lack of a garden put you off gardening. A sunny windowsill is all you need to get started, of course the more space you have the better. So you need to decide how much you’re going to do or how much you have the potential to do.

1. Growing in pots on a sunny windowsill.
2. Growing in pots and a grow bag or two outside on the patio or clearing.
3. Digging up the ground, growing larger plants in the ground along with smaller plants in pots.
4. You’ve got the space in the garden for every gardener’s dream. A salad garden here, a strawberry patch there, plenty of space for all your favourite foods plus a fruit tree or two.

Depending on which level you intend to garden at, some of this info won’t be relevant however I’ll cover all aspects as best I can.

Garden Preparation

For those who are going for the actual gardening aspect, and are ready to attack the ground in their back garden, then you need to determine what you’re going to do and grow there. Also, what type of soil do you have, what areas catch the sun and when. For most plants you’ll want them to get the morning or afternoon/evening sun. The midday sun is usually the hottest, and in the peak of summer a lot of plants won’t like the midday sun, especially your salad plants, but if you can cover these over then it shouldn’t be so much of a concern.

The best garden is a south facing garden. This gives you maximum sun exposure on at least 3 sides of the garden. You also then need to think about what will sit best where. The west facing side will get the morning sun, however once the sun goes off that side, it will start to cool, and if it gets too cold over night and then a strong sun on them first thing in the morning this could cause the plants damage. This side is better suited to plants that are happier in cooler conditions and that can perhaps withstand the potential colder temperatures such as garlic (the colder the temperature the stronger the garlic) and potatoes.

Your ground will also need inspecting. If it’s clearly not been touched in a while then you may need to give the ground a dig through, check for any rubbish (plenty of builders and non gardeners will happily dump and bury rubbish, bricks, empty plastic cannisters etc.), and also inspect the type of soil you’re dealing with. If nothing’s been growing in the ground or if the ground seems in quite a bad state then it would probably be a good idea to dig in some compost or farm manure. You don’t need to dig very far down. Also if the grounds seems fairly solid with clay, you’ll need to build up the soil with manure and perhaps some top soil to give the ground a big of drainage as clay will hold water when it rains and dry out and crack when it’s hot and sunny.

A good idea can also be to build your beds up by setting up an additional barrier around the garden bed, a length of wood on its side held up with pegs in the ground. This allows you to raise the bed above normal ground height, so that rather than digging too far down into the ground you can skim the surface and instead add the new decent soil and manure on top.

The ideal time to get your garden ready is now. Any plants grown from seeds won’t be going into the ground just yet, so this should give you a couple of weeks to start preparing your ground ready for when the spring and warmer weather hits.

If you’ve already got some plants in the ground such as raspberry canes, strawberry plants, fruit bushes, herb plants, then obviously you don’t want to dig these up to dig any nutrition into the soil for the year ahead. Take your compost or manure and add this onto the top of the soil around the bottom of the plants. This is known as mulching and should be done in either October/November time and/or in early spring (so… now!).

Posted by Sarah

Despite talking about it a few times I realised I haven’t posted up my own recipe/method for Risotto. The following great for using up any left over meat from a roast dinner, or using raw meat cooked up. I also find it’s great for padding out with vegetables as you can add in so much easily.

So you need (this is designed for 2 people, you may have to vary things a little for more)
2 flozs of uncooked long grain white rice or basmati rice (or proper risotto rice I guess!), per person.
3/4 pint of boiling water
1 knorr chicken stock cube or beef stock cube
Diced cooked meat - roast chicken left over from sunday roast, beef, pork, lamb (again from sunday roast), or quickly fried chicken breast
handful of peas
other veg you want - leek, spring onion, fine beans, courgette, green pepper - all chopped small(ish)
1 medium onion, diced

Optional
1 dsp of cream or sour cream if you’re not concerned about calories
Grated Parmesan cheese
Pinch of Saffron infused in a small amount of hot water

Method
Melt a little butter or heat a bit of olive oil in a hot frying pan, add onions and fry until softened. Add the rice and stir occasionally until all the butter/oil is absorbed.
In the mean time disolve the stock cube in the 3/4 pint of water. Also infuse the saffron in a little additional water and leave to one side.
Add the stock to the rice, put on a low heat and cover. Leave for 10-15 minutes (perfect time to now chop the veg!)
Add meat and vegetables, stir in, leave for another 5 minutes.
Once the stock has almost been absorbed by the rice and veg it’s finished unless you want any of the following in it

Stir in your cream if you’re using it.
Stir in saffron infusion (strands ‘n all) if you’re using it. Should go a nice yellow colour now!
Stir in grated parmesan for a slightly stronger taste.

Of course you can also throw in prawns, smoked ham, chorizo (can’t spell that) sausage etc. just add it when the meat and veg go in. I know saffron doesn’t strictly go in Risotto as that’s more Paella, but it gives it a nice yellow colour and does add to the flavour a little, however it’s not necessary. The parmesan cheese in it is very nice though! I know the true way to do risotto is to just add a little bit of stock, allow it to be absorbed and keep doing it that way. However that’s too faffy! This comes out pretty okay I think. Once you try it once I’m sure you’ll alter things to suit your own taste!

Posted by Sarah

If you’re a member of Costco Cash and Carry in the UK then grab your spring wallet of savings and get on down to your local store to pick up a couple of boxes of Torres Vina Sol, a dry white wine currently costing just £17.50 per box of 6 bottles (usual price is around £4+ a bottle from most supermarkets). This wine is a great, light white wine that can easily be drunk with or without food, and no need for any soda water.

Take a look at a Wine Review of it, or just take my word for it

Posted by Sarah

This year I won’t have a proper garden to look after and grow food in. Whilst we have a garden at our new house, there’s no beds, the sun doesn’t really get into the garden and if it did, there’d be a nice Silverbirch tree to hang over the plants too anyway! Plus we’re planning to move from here by October, and I don’t want to have to worry about getting my plants out of yet another garden. So this year I’ll be growing strawberries in pots, I’ll probably get a grow bag and do a couple of tomato plants, I’ve got my herbs in pots already, and I’ll maybe do a few lettuce, radish and spring onion in some large pots as well.

At least this year we have a kitchen windowsill which the sun gets on at around 12pm and once the sun stays higher it should stay on the window for a couple of hours at least, so I may not bother with putting my greenhouse up and just start off any seeds on the windowsill instead. I’ve given my raspberry canes to a friend as I can get more of those from my Dad next year if I’ve got the opportunity to plant them out.

So there won’t be as much going on with the garden here this year, but I’ll let you know how my plant pot garden is going